


She's a Fragile Girl, Skin Like Porcelain

by SegaBarrett



Category: Chess - Rice/Ulvaeus/Andersson
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-14 23:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13600311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Florence and Svetlana can't help but be intrigued by each other.





	She's a Fragile Girl, Skin Like Porcelain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenoglossy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenoglossy/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Chess, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title is from "Jennifer" by M2M.

She should be thinking of Anatoly as she watches the woman walk away from the plane.

She should be thinking of Anatoly as they speculate on who she could be, and why the champion defected for her.

She should be – she shouldn’t be here at all, she should be back with her children, being stoic. That’s the stereotype, after all – they always want Russians, especially Russian women, to be so damned stoic, to act as if nothing phases them at all, to be as icy as the Siberian landscape.

She should only be thinking of her husband right now. The task at hand.

It’s funny how she’s been told that American men try and send out for Russian brides. Mail-order, they call them – like the Soviet mail service isn’t as disjointed as the rest of the state-run entities. They’d never have luck sending whole people – but she pictures it anyway, a woman in a box, a man slicing through packing tape with a knife and stating that she’s just what he always wanted.

Russian men know better. They know that they will not get what they always wanted, or even sometimes wanted. And Russian women, they knew best of all.

She wonders about her, and it’s strange what she wonders. She’s read those novels where women sit around wondering what the mistress gives their husband that they cannot, filled with angst and sadness and hearts bleeding over someone they probably never loved in the first place until he fell into bed with somebody else.

But instead she’s wondering what Florence Vassy’s hair feels like. It’s stubbornly bouncing at her sides, short and cut into a bob, businesslike and perky. She’s a different kind of woman and maybe that’s why Anatoly chose her. He would like a trophy set to hang up, perhaps.

Svetlana turns off the television and rolls back over, underneath the covers. Bangkok is too hot and sweltering and far away from her children. She wishes that she could just turn around and go back home, that she could let Anatoly go. Let him fly away.

It’s hard to sleep.

***

Florence pulls the comb over her hair and lets out a sigh, looking at Anatoly. She doesn't know him, not the way that she should after sleeping beside him for a year. She should know who he is, what he wants, and what he is made of. 

But that isn’t why she had jumped feet-first into this relationship. She knows everything about Freddie Trumper, uncomfortably so – she’s surprised she doesn’t know when he took his first steps or when he got his MMR shot. 

Anatoly is mysterious, cold sometimes, distant. Tall, dark, handsome and quiet.

And then there’s Svetlana. It’s been hard not to have the woman’s face floating through her dreams ever since she first saw the picture, the one that Anatoly hadn’t hidden well enough.

_So that’s what I’m up against._

She wonders if Anatoly wishes he had just stayed home, considering all of what’s happened. 

She tries to shake the dream she keeps having, the one where she looks in the mirror and sees Svetlana instead of herself. A woman shaped by ice and cold – that’s what Russia is made of, isn’t it? The way she had always pictured it as a little girl. An icy force that had pulled away everything she had ever known.

She wonders if the woman’s hands would feel like ice if she touched them, if she would give Florence that horrid tingle as the blood rushes back in after being out on a cold day. 

Or maybe there’s a warmth there, a heat.

Part of Florence wants to find out.

***

When they meet each other, their first instinct is to stare each other down, to want to growl like jungle cats or hiss like snakes so they can size each other up, so that one of the two can win.

Everything is a game, after all, every move a gambit and every turn a potential checkmate. But they quickly see that there is no winning, at least not in the way they might think.

To walk away with Anatoly would not be to win, merely to go another round.

She’s intrigued. She had never been this closed to another woman on purpose, had usually kept her distance. She had grown up in a variety of foster homes where distance had been at a minimum and thus there was no reason to try to get close to anyone if you didn’t have to. Someone would always be breathing down your neck, and you would be trying to move as far away as you could.

Svetlana is different. It is as if she glides places rather than simply walks, nimble as a cat. Florence can’t help but stare. 

She has to force herself to speak first.

“So, you’re here.” It sounds a lot more confrontational than she wanted it to – she doesn’t want to seem like the “other woman” the way she’s seen them in books and movies, the woman in a fur coat slinking over to rub her hands up a man’s chest possessively. The kind of woman who would get cheered if she was run over or pushed over by the aggrieved wife.

“I am here,” Svetlana offers in response, locking her eyes back on Florence before looking her up and down. “You are as well.”

“I’m sorry about…” Florence begins, but it all feels flat. What is she sorry for? Falling for Anatoly? Breaking up his marriage? She hadn’t known at first, but she had known soon enough.

Svetlana shrugs, and they look at each other for a long time, before they both walk away.

Florence is sure it’s forever.

***

Florence nearly tosses her purse to the ground in fury when the double-decker bus drives right past her and refuses to stop.

 _Even public transportation hates me now,_ she muses. Since she returned home from Bangkok, it seems like everything has been a never-ending barrage of disaster. 

She lives alone and cannot picture life being otherwise. She does not even keep a plant to water or a scraggly house-cat on her doorstep.

She misses Anatoly, misses Freddie even, misses being needed. Now she is free but has nothing pressing to do with the freedom.

Except, she is discovering, to rage at the big red buses that seem to never see her clearly waiting at the bus stop or running up to the corner, that pull away just in time to mock her.

She pivots on her heels and realizes that people are looking at her as she hurls curses outward, and she turns around to go back home to escape any further humiliation as a result.

There is a woman waiting at the door when she arrives.

“Svetlana.”

Florence jumps back a little, as if it is some kind of hit, the killer who pops out from under the stairs when the hapless victim least expects it.

But Svetlana is the one who looks hapless – there is a tear streak down her cheek that has smudged her make-up. 

“Florence… I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to go.”

“It’s… hello, Svetlana. It’s okay. Let me let you in.”

Florence turns the key in the lock and steps inside, ashamed of how barren the place was. When she had been a little girl she had wanted a house cluttered with treasures, hobby horses and toys from top to bottom. That has not turned out.

She leads Svetlana to the couch and takes a seat, beckoning her to do the same.

“Why are you here?” she asks, trying not to make it sound cold. 

“I left. Anatoly. Russia. I left.” Svetlana puts her hands in her lap and shrugs. “I couldn’t do it anymore…”

“Your kids?”

“With Anatoly.”

“Why England?”

She shrugs.

“It seemed like a safe place.”

And it sounds, to Florence, like she’s saying that Florence is a safe place.

Florence has no idea what to do with that.

***

Svetlana wonders if this is the British and American ideal of “having a roommate”. It seems to pop up in all of the shows she goes by on Florence’s television – “whacky hijinks” that occur because a bunch of college chums have decided to live together.

In Russia, “roommates” are a bunch of angry and drunken young adults living side by side in rooming houses and fighting one another at night.

Florence stays up all night sometimes, and Svetlana finds it difficult to adjust to the time change as it is. She spends hours looking through newspaper ads and trying to determine who may be willing to hire a woman with a Russian name. It would be harder in America, she reasons, but that doesn’t make the process any easier.

One day when she wants to give up, she leans her head on to the end of Florence’s couch and falls asleep with the paper tucked beneath her chin, newsprint rubbing off against her skin.

Florence can’t help but settle in beside her, wrapping her arms around her. She’s soft and good and the sound of her breathing feels right. 

She leans in and places a kiss to Svetlana’s neck, and the other woman sleepily leans into it.

It’s a first step, and a quiet, awkward one at that.

But Florence finally feels as if she’s going somewhere.


End file.
